With new, multi-vendor AI, data, and analytics tools and hybrid working models, contact centre environments are becoming even more complex than just five years ago.
Yet, each solution plays its part in the patchwork quilt that enables the desired customer experience outcomes. Unfortunately, the stitching that holds everything together is not always reliable.
Indeed, a next-generation, growing CX stack is not always easy to maintain. And, when journey frictions and outages arise, it is much more difficult to detect and diagnose technology issues before they significantly impact customer, employee, and business outcomes.
What is VoiceWatch?
Hammer offers a cloud platform that “hammers” the contact centre with synthetic customer interactions to test resiliency. In doing so, operations garner unique insights that pave the way for smooth service experiences.
Its latest addition to this platform is VoiceWatch. By emulating real-world customer interactions, the solution scours the entire telephony system for current and potential technical problems. These occur as contacts pass between the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the IVR application.
Such a tool is helpful to test contact centre deployments and accelerate digital transformation. Yet, perhaps more pertinently, it becomes simple to find the root cause when technology errors arise.
Building on this point, Mark Kowal, Director of Product Marketing, says:
“Typically, contact centre administrators search for areas that they believe could be causing the issue but may not address the complete problem, leading to unintended consequences of not correcting the root cause. VoiceWatch covers the entire call experience from the cradle to the grave.”
What’s more, the solution develops forecasts to proactively solve customer issues before they happen. Through such capabilities, companies can simplify cloud migrations, reduce time to market, and continuously safeguard customer satisfaction and effort.
What differentiates the VoiceWatch solution?
Bad brand interactions stay with customers. 2020 Shep Hyken research suggests that 96% of customers leave brands because of poor customer service. Consider the voice channel as an example. Delays, awful audio, and chaotic conversations have a lasting effect.
For this reason – alongside others – many companies are turning to CX testing tools. But what sets VoiceWatch apart? These three factors are significant differentiators:
- Customization – VoiceWatch enables users to create, configure, and run tests across almost any contact centre ecosystem, no matter the vendor. No submission of change requests. The control is in your hands.
- Omnichannel – Harnessing the power of Hammer cloud, VoiceWatch monitors contacts as they shift across channels – such as web live chats, texts, and email – facilitating high-quality omnichannel experiences.
- End-to-End Experience – Unlike other solutions, VoiceWatch can test the entire end-to-end experience, not only ensuring every call reaches its destination but also that the right information, is delivered with it. For example, a customer may test a true end-to-end experience where calls are monitored through the IVR to the agents at a BPOs, complex integrations and transfers, and multiple domains.
- Data Analytics – Offering real-time visibility of how the contact centre is running, VoiceWatch allows access to trending analysis, customized reporting, and a transparent view of where failures occur.
The top 3 critical benefits for CX
Without a proactive CX monitoring solution, contact centres must perform manual testing that does not emulate real customer scenarios, making root-cause analysis much more difficult.
On top of this, operations will have little to no access to performance trends and historical reporting. As a result, leaders may ignore critical issues – perceived as outliers – that wind up being significant.
Meanwhile, contact centres miss out on several other benefits, such as verifying if the correct prompt plays throughout the IVR and – more pertinently – creating a comprehensive and inclusive testing plan.
With each of these advantages, the benefits of VoiceWatch are rich and complex. Yet, throwing caution to the wind, here are three prime contenders.
1) Higher Quality of Experience (QoE)
End-to-end testing, which includes automated customer conversations, allows contact centres to customize tests across various customer journeys – not just through the IVR.
Also, by swiftly removing the risk of audio and network issues, proactive monitoring tools – like VoiceWatch – brands protect their reputation and remove infuriating customer pain points.
2) Performance accuracy
With Hammer Cloud, companies can gain quick insights into how each component of the contact centre journey is functioning.
Sharing an excellent example, Kowal says:
“Get detailed information on exactly where your IVR and system are breaking – not just a warning that something is wrong. This minimizes diagnostic time and gets issues fixed fast.”
In doing so, contact centres can track the availability, accuracy, and performance of network components, voice solutions, and back-end database systems.
As such, operations leaders may monitor all aspects of the system, ensuring integrations operate correctly and that the system is fully functional.
3) Proactive issue discovery
VoiceWatch can eliminate contact centre downtime by 95 percent, through proactive issue detection, early discovery, and the diagnosis of troublesome faults.
In particular industries, this is mission-critical as system issues are more than just an incredible expense; but need to be reported to government agencies, regulators, and various institutions. Utilities is a prime example of this.
As such, forecasting potential issues is both a money and reputation saver, which VoiceWatch achieves through isolating persistent bottlenecks and concerning system trends. Building on this point, Kowal adds:
“Complement existing system management and passive monitoring tools with ongoing customer experience monitoring is critical. Hammer provides the complete solution.”
Indeed, with VoiceWatch, companies can find issues before they cause significant problems, saving time, money, and sanity for agents and customers alike.
Find out more about the VoiceWatch solution
Ready to protect the contact centre from downtime, accelerate CX transformation, and safeguard customer satisfaction? If so, VoiceWatch is perhaps the ideal solution.
Charlie Mitchell, CX Today - Read the original article here.
